Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies

Alien

My third post about typography in sci-fi has been gestating for a while now. Indeed, it’s been slowly taking shape – you might say it’s been forming itself inside of me – for really quite some time.

I’m delighted to say that it is now ready to burst forth from my allegorical chest, and to spatter allegorical typographic blood all over your allegorical faces. Welcome to Typeset In The Future: The Alien Edition.

The opening credits for Alien are nothing short of a typographic masterpiece. You can watch them in their entirety on the Art Of The Title web site, but here’s the general gist: a slow, progressive disclosure of a disjointed, customized Futura reveals the movie’s central theme over 90 seconds of beautifully-spaced angular lettering.

(Before I show you how it looks, I should provide a sizable caveat: I got a lot of grief following my Moon article for spoiling that movie’s central twist. So, if you don’t want to know the extra-terrestrial nature of the central antagonist in Alien, close your eyes now.)

Here we go.

Can you tell what it is yet?

It’s looking pretty angular.

And beautifully mirrored, at least along the y-axis.

Well, that was unexpected. I’m still none the wiser, mind.

WAIT A MINUTE. I might have an idea where this is going.

Oh, no, I was wrong. Still, that new line is almost certainly completing the middle part of a W, yes? (It certainly looks like two strokes and a crotch, at least from where I’m standing.)

I hate to say it, but a little bit of the bar on this capital A (for it is he) has been allowed to bleed out into the unfolding titles. Talk about typographic spoilers. Look really closely and you’ll see what I mean:

That’s totally going to become a capital A, isn’t it? God, that’s ruined everything. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that this entire credits sequence is going to end up spelling the word ALIEN:

Right you are, then. Let’s get on with it. (For those of you with your eyes closed to avoid spoilers: you can open them again now.)

After all that Futura-ish beauty, it’s a little disappointing to see a follow-up card introduce commercial towing vehicle The Nostromo with some slightly fuzzy Helvetica:

This title card from Alien is an example – possibly the Ur Example – of a popular sci-fi trope, the Foreshadowing Inventory. Seven crew, you say? Hmm. Seven. Let’s hope nothing disastrous happens to them, one by one. And their course is set for a return to Earth, eh? Well, I’m sure that’s the likely outcome for this particular story.

The Foreshadowing Inventory crops up in other movies too, such as the opening card from Moon:

A crew of one, you say? And there for only three years? Interesting. I wonder if these facts will turn out to be significant to the plot?

Let’s take a look on board the Nostromo. The opening shots of the craft give some tantalizing glimpses of its wall-based iconography:

These icons are the work of cinematic design legend Ron Cobb. He named them the Semiotic Standard For All Commercial Trans-Stellar Utility Lifter And Heavy Element Transport Spacecraft. The production sketches below are from Cobb’s 1981 collected works, Colorvision:

You might have noticed that these icons bear a striking resemblance to the rounded rectangles used for modern app iconography. Indeed, design company The Iconfactory has recreated the Semiotic Standard as a beautiful set of iOS app icons. It could be argued that Cobb provided the inspiration for rounded-rectangle iconography some 28 years before Apple made it the standard on the iPhone. (Although tegestologists may well argue their case too.)

A quick glance back over the iconography of Moon shows that (like many sci-fi movies) it owes a large debt to the Semiotic Standard:

On the subject of iconography: the set of Alien was actually built as a single sprawling series of interconnected rooms, just like the set of Moon. Here we have the Nostromo‘s Control Room at the top of the photo, connected to the Central Corridor below:

I like to think that the Semiotic Standard served a practical purpose for the cast, helping them to navigate around the Nostromo as they made their way through filming.

The crew are noticeable by their absence at the start of the movie, as reinforced by this Helvetica-monikered EMERGENCY HELMET:

(At least, I say it’s Helvetica – the G is dead cert, but the second M looks more like Futura. Either way, let’s hope there’ll be no need for emergency helmets.)

The Nostromo‘s computers blip into life unexpectedly. You can tell they are the Nostromo‘s computers, because they say Nostromo 180924609 on their boot screen. On this occasion, I don’t recognize the font:

The ship’s registration number is contracted on the next on-screen display:

This screen lists the ship as the Weylan Yutani Nostromo 180246. (Eagle-eyed viewers will have spotted that subsequent Alien films name the company Weyland Yutani, not Weylan Yutani.)

Furthermore, this screenshot shows that the Nostromo has a refinement capacity of “200,000,000 tonnes”, and not the “20,000,000 tons” mentioned in the Foreshadowing Inventory. That’s not just a factor of ten out – it’s also an entirely different unit of measurement.

UPDATE: Several commenters have noted that potential cargo capacity isn’t the same as current cargo, and that the refinery might just be mostly empty. A confession: I realized that myself when writing the article, and was rather hoping that no-one would pull me up for it. Given the audience for this blog, I really should have known better. There’s still the more fundamental problem of tons vs tonnes, however, as I go on to explain…

If you’re familiar with units of weight, you’ll know that a ton is 2,000 pounds if you’re American (known as a “short ton”), or 2,240 pounds if you’re British (known as a “long ton”). Conversely, a tonne (also known as a “metric ton”) is precisely 1,000 kilograms, which is roughly 2,205 pounds.

At this point, you might be thinking: “Wait – why are we talking about units of measurement? Why should I, Joe or Jane Blog-Reader, care about a typographic anomaly in the measurement units of a space-based computer?”

You really should know the answer to that by now. Typography is always important.

Here’s a map of all of the countries in the world that still use pounds as their primary unit of weight:

And here’s why you should care. In September 1999, NASA lost its Mars Climate Orbiter craft, ruining a mission that cost over 655 million dollars. The reason for this loss? One part of the Orbiter calculated propulsion in the Imperial system of pound-seconds of thrust, whereas another part used the international standard metric system of newton-seconds of thrust. This caused the Orbiter to gradually deviate from its intended trajectory, and disintegrate in the Mars atmosphere. (And the bit that worked in pound-seconds wasn’t made in Liberia or Myanmar.)

But enough about massive nuclear explosions – we won’t be needing any of those. Let’s get back to the Nostromo.

The ship’s crew awake from hypersleep, only to discover that they’re not on course for Earth after all. (Damn you, Foreshadowing Inventory!) Star charts are consulted, as they try to work out what’s going on:

This screenshot contains not one but four details of note. The first is some random text on the right-hand monitor screen:

Well, I say random… it may be significant that the text includes the phrase D GILER. (That name might sound familiar.)

The second item of interest is that packet of cigarettes:

Although it’s less clear-cut than D GILER, it’s significant that the actor who played the alien in Alien was none other than 6′10″ Nigerian design student Bolaji Badejo. The similarity of name may just be coincidence, however.

The third item of note is a coffee mug bearing the Weylan-Yutani winged logo:

This logo appears everywhere onboard the ship. Indeed, the Balaji Imperial cigarettes are about the only items that are not corporately branded. Clothing, containers, mugs, even cat dishes all display the corporate logo…

The fourth item of note in that screenshot from earlier is the monitor screen itself. A perennial challenge for any sci-fi film is to find a visual style that remains futuristic as technology marches on. The Nostromo‘s production design is a perfect example of used future chic, but shows the challenge of using physical display technology from the 1970s alongside film-based special effects.

Early in the film, we cut from a blurry, low-res shot of an Elite-like descent trajectory:

…to a hi-res animated display of the same descent:

Similarly, when Dallas (the ship’s captain) visits the Nostromo’s master computer (known as “MU/TH/UR”) to find out what’s going on, we cut from a low-res 4:3 CRT display:

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the disconnect between these displays that’s at fault. Rather, it’s the presence of those cathode ray tube displays at all:

That curved screen shape immediately shouts “legacy technology”. In 2014, seeing a curved CRT display in a futuristic spacecraft, rather than the ubiquitous flat LCD screens of today, feels somewhat archaic. This was a deliberate choice by the movie’s design team at the time – they chose everyday CRT screens rather than high-tech flat screen displays, to match the rest of the Nostromo’s beaten-up kit – but it dates the movie with hindsight.

Ironically, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was made 11 years before Alien, and yet has screen technology that looks substantially more futuristic. In the late 1960s, when A Space Odyssey was made, computer graphics simply weren’t good enough to generate the on-screen imagery needed for the Jupiter mission. As a result, all of the screen imagery was hand-animated, and projected onto flat surfaces:

(Interestingly, the makers of 2014’s Alien: Isolation video game actually reverted to 1970’s video technology to make the game feel more like the original movie. The game’s menu screens were first rendered in software, then recorded on to VHS video tapes, played on a CRT display, filmed, and imported back into the game.)

One final typographic point of note: the on-screen display font for MU/TH/UR appears to be an optically stretched version of City Light:

This is most unusual, if only for being a serif (rather than sans-serif) on-screen computer font in a sci-fi movie.

As the movie unfolds, MU/TH/UR’s behavior reinforces the TITF trend for untrustworthy space-based computers. We discover that MU/TH/UR is a Series 6000:

In addition to the CRT displays, there’s a second aspect of Alien’s design that clearly dates the movie to the 70s. For the most part, the movie’s costume design displays a timeless aesthetic for a working interstellar haulage crew:

The exception is Captain Dallas’s jacket, which has the word “NOSTROMO” written on the back in Pump Demi:

Pump Demi was recently voted “Most 70s Font Of All Time” by the International Font Council. That’s not actually true, but it might as well be. It goes to show that it’s very hard to know which aspects of a design will still look futuristic in the future.

Pump Demi is also seen on the crew’s nameplates in the main Nostromo cabin. You can recognize it from its freaky capital Y, even when blurry:

But enough about Pump. We saw earlier how an international mishap with measurement units cost NASA $655m. Alien goes one step further, with possibly the most expensive on-screen localisation error in the history of science fiction.

You’d think that the Weylan(d)-Yutani Corporation, as a large British / Japanese conglomerate, would be familiar with the need for precise translation and localization. However, you would be wrong, sir or madam. Very wrong indeed.

Let’s rejoin Ripley onboard the Nostromo. As the last of her crew-mates are slain by the lurking xenomorph, Ripley realizes that the only option is an Emergency Systems Override to self-destruct the ship. She presses the EMERGENCY button marked PUSH…

…pulls the EMERGENCY lever marked PULL…

…unscrews the EMERGENCY screw…

…unscrews the other EMERGENCY screw…

…pulls two EMERGENCY levers, usefully marked ONE and TWO…

…and finally open the EMERGENCY hatch. (I’m not sure why there are four pulled levers in the background of this shot; Ripley only actually pulls two of them.)

This hatch gives access to the Emergency Destruction System:

Let’s straighten up the screen to make it a bit more readable:

This beautiful (and by the looks of things, hand-painted) display contains yet more typographic foreshadowing. We learn that on activation, the ship will detonate in T minus 10 minutes. Moreover, the Failsafe Cut-Off System will not operate after T minus 5 minutes.

With those surely insignificant facts typographically established, let’s take a look at the scuttle procedure itself. (For the uninitiated, “scuttling” is the nautical procedure of deliberately sinking one’s own ship.)

Perhaps unexpectedly, the Scuttle Procedure instructions are presented in both English and French versions. Being American, Ripley naturally follows the English version. Here we see her tracing the English instructions with her finger:

After the fourth NUCLEAR BOLT enters the fourth HOLD, an Ominous Clock starts counting down to T minus ten minutes:

The Ominous Clock is accompanied by an Ominous Voice, which reminds us that “the option to override automatic detonation expires in T minus five minutes.” Let’s see how that one plays out.

During the next five minutes or so, Ripley heads towards the Nostromo’s shuttle to make her escape, with her cat, Jonesy, in a handy industrial cat box. Somewhere along the way, Ripley encounters the alien, directly between her and the escape shuttle she’s trying to reach:

There’s clearly no way through, and the ship is about to detonate. In her panic, she drops Jonesy, leaving him to his alien fate:

Ripley dashes back to the Emergency Destruction Room, desperately trying to stop the self-destruct process and give herself chance to escape. As she arrives at the Emergency Destruction Room, the Ominous Voice counts down the final seconds to inevitable failsafe cutoff.

29…

28…

27…

Let’s pause that countdown temporarily, and take a moment to put ourselves in Ripley’s situation. There’s an alien xenomorph with acid for blood running around a dimly-lit spacecraft, picking off your co-workers one by one. You’re the sole remaining survivor. Your only form of defense is a single-canister flamethrower. You have thirty seconds to halt the self-destruct sequence for your spacecraft – and you’ve just gone and lost your cat.

I think it’s fair to say that this is a stressful scenario.

Perhaps this is why, on arriving back at the ship-scuttling instructions, Ripley follows the French instructions with her finger, not the English ones from before:

And this is where it all goes horribly wrong.

Let’s take a look at those French instructions in more detail:

Poussez le NUCLEAR BOLT CODE No 1

Vérifier CRAMPON de L’ACHEMENT

Exécutez INSERTION/BOULON No 1 a la cale No 1

Vérifier SÉCURITÉ du SOMMET NUCLEAR

Vérifier SÉCURITÉ du SOMMET NUCLEAR

Vérifier la DETONATION ACTIVE

Hmm… something something “NUCLEAR BOLT”… something something “SÉCURITÉ”… it certainly sounds plausible. But how do these compare to the English instructions we verified the efficacy of earlier?

For the first three steps, all is bon. But from instruction four onwards, things take a definite turn for the worse. The French instructions don’t mention anything about removing the NUCLEAR HEAD, activating the PUSH BUTTON SWITCH, or replacing the NUCLEAR HEAD. All three of which seemed pretty damn important when Ripley was doing them earlier.

The French instructions do at least remind us to check that things are secured. Indeed, just for good measure, they remind us to check them twice. This is commendable belt-and-braces stuff on an average day, but it’s not really what you want when you’ve got thirty seconds left before inexorable destruction.

In a further example of the famous French passion for safety, the instructions also ask us to verify that the detonation is active (which it won’t be, because we forgot to activate the push button switch). However, they completely neglect to mention that the process needs to be repeated for the other three holds.

In short: this is a localization disaster. I mean, it would be bad at the best of times – but we’ve just lost our cat to a xenomorph. We’re in no fit state to cope with dodgy French.

Thanks to this truly awful piece of translation, Ripley fails to abort the detonation process in time, and the five-minute countdown to total detonation continues:

Although we do cut briefly to a screen that still shows a countdown of over ten minutes:

The five minutes to destruction are typographically uninteresting. Ripley makes it to the escape shuttle with no sign of the alien. She even finds her not-dead cat along the way. With seconds remaining, her shuttle detaches from the Nostromo, blasting away just before either 20 (or 200) million tons (or tonnes) of mineral ore explode into tiny fragments:

Just before the explosion, we see a brief ENVIRON CTR PURGE display onboard the shuttle:

This screen might be familiar to fans of Ridley Scott’s other classic sci-fi movie, Blade Runner, which has a remarkably similar screen onboard a flying police vehicle:

There’s one more typographic anomaly to be found during the self-destruct sequence. Remember when Ripley was punching NUCLEAR BOLT CODE No 1 into that funny-looking keyboard? Well, it turns out to be a very strange keyboard indeed. Here’s the central panel for your closer inspection. I’ve Photoshopped a composite image from several frames, to make it easier to see all of the keys without Ripley getting her hand in the way:

The first key of note is “PRANIC LIFT 777”:

Prana is the Sanskrit word for “life force”. It’s a cosmic energy believed to come from the sun, and to connect the elements of the universe.

We also have “PADME”, a possible variant of Padma, Sanskrit for “lotus flower”:

Yoni is a symbol for the Hindu Divine Mother, an embodiment of Shakti, the concept of divine feminine creative power. This might explain why we also have a “SHAKTI EXCESS” button on the keyboard:

But perhaps the oddest key on the keyboard is this one in the top right hand corner – “AGARIC FLY”:

Now, Agaric Fly – or Fly Agaric, as it’s more commonly known – is a mushroom and psychoactive fungus known for triggering a hallucinogenic experience:

Photo credit: Matthew Kirkland

You might think this is an odd thing to be written on the keyboard of an emergency destruction system. You would be correct.

This might also explain why the key to the left of “AGARIC FLY” is labelled, simply, “TRIP”:

So why are all of these strange references on the Nostromo’s emergency destruct keyboard? Well, according to the Alien Explorations blog, designer Simon Deering needed some complex-sounding labels for the keyboard at short notice. He was reading The Secret Doctrine by Helena Blavatsky, a Russian philosopher and occultist, at the time of filming. Blavatsky’s book attempts to explain the origin and evolution of the universe in terms derived from the Hindu concept of cyclical development. Deering found his inspiration in its pages, and the Nostromo‘s odd keyboard was born.

Back to the action. Ripley is safely on board the shuttle, with no sign of the alien. But wait – just when we think all is rosy, it turns out that the damned thing has also stowed away on the shuttle. Gah!

Thankfully, this shuttle comes equipped with a system that pipes highly toxic and flammable SPECIAL GASES into the main cockpit at the press of a button:

It’s not immediately clear why this is a particularly useful or safe feature to have in a shuttle. Nonetheless, it certainly comes in handy when there’s an alien hiding in the wall.

According to Wikipedia, Nitrosyl Chloride is “very toxic and irritating to the lungs, eyes, and skin”. I don’t know whether the alien actually has any of these organs, but he definitely doesn’t like Nitrosyl Chloride one bit, and starts squealing like a frog in a roomful of cats:

(I’m going to ignore the fact that Nitrosyl Chloride gas is actually yellow. It’s working, and that’s all that matters.)

The gas finally forces the alien out into the open. A forward-thinking Ripley (who’s already strapped herself into a chair) opens the shuttle’s exterior door, and blasts the alien into space. Go Ripley!

In her final recorded message before hypersleep, Ripley notes that she is the sole survivor of the Nostromo. What she forgets to mention is that she has not once in the past two hours encountered any Eurostile Bold Extended.

We shouldn’t let this worry us as she settles down to sleep, however. There’s a ton of Eurostile in Aliens, so all will be made right. But that, my friends, is a story for another day.

No dude, the French instructions make no sense at all. And they are more Engl-ench than anything… But even for someone versed in English and French like me, it makes no effing sense (Google-translate it at your peril;).

Actually, mass is measured in pounds too–it’s that what we commonly call “weight” means something different in scientific contexts, where weight is the force of an object due to gravity. Pounds can be used as both a unit for force and for mass.

Thanks for a great review of the Alien movie, one of my favorite movies since I was a kid. I like this focus on icons and typeface. What i find interesting is that the typeface of the computer mother has changed from the original version! I was looking forward to you commenting on what i still think it’s the most awesome sci-fi computer typeface ever conceived. I don’t know what the typeface is exactly, but something close to this http://www.letraset.com/products/404-Data-70/. Yet I can’t find any video nor picture to substantiate this… Google failed me. So I have to go into Dr. House mode here: my guess is that they changed it when digitizing the movie. This fits well with your observation that the computer screen suddenly turns into full hd 16:9 mode. I mean that did not exist in 1979 when the movie was released. Also, you must be born post VHS era since you being into typeface didn’t notice this. I’m sure you’ll find someone who can confirm this.

As always, a fantastically fun read! I had forgotten about the trick with the “A” in the opening sequence until you reminded me of it.

If you take suggestions, I hope you would look at the font usage in Gerry Anderson’s “UFO”, Stargate (either the movie or the Stargate SG-1 TV series) and “Iron Man” (especially the funky keyboard Tony Stark uses at his design console).

Found this…uhmmm…sorry my brain is a bit fried now after this. Haha! Anyway, thanks to my HTC “blink-feed” I found this. It said “An analysis of Alien that’s terrifyingly, wonderfully geeky”. So I decided to take a look. And my measly mind was mush from the get go. And I love it!
I just wanted to comment and say this is amazing stuff and I’m glad I got to read this! I will definitely be roaming around your site reading more after I recover my brain cells!

I am a graphic design student who has a deep love of science fiction. This site feels like it was created just to give me something to read every night before bed. It’s not enough to say that this site is in my bookmarks. This site is now in my heart.

This is beautiful, thank you so much for this wonderful blog post! I love how you put in so many details and still manage to be funny AND link your sources. It’s rare to see websites that are that well researched.

Although it seems odd to mix the measurement units, there is no inherent conflict between the inventory stating that they have 20,000,000 tons of ore on board and the stated CAPACITY to refine 200,000,000 tonnes. The only question that raises is why are they returning to Earth with a load of less than 9% of their capacity.

This is one of the best posts of any kind I’ve ever read. I’m not even into this stuff and it was a great read. I agree with the commenter above: The Fifth Element and the original Total Recall would be great to dive into.

This is why it took me 30 hours instead of 20 to finish the game. I was to busy admiring the design work and artistry the entire time, which led to me being killed by the Xenomorph a lot. (I didn’t mind)

Another excellent and minutely researched post – thank you! It does make me wonder though: why do the designers of spaceships always seem to produce signage indicating DANGER in UPPERCASE because it’s so IMPORTANT, rather than in lowercase which is easier to read when you’re in a hurry?

Being somewhat unenthusiastic by nature I will say it’s only almost the best post in the history of the internet and only almost justifies the invention of the medium by itself.

I was particularly taken with the nuclear bolt keyboard, and wonder, since the lovely shopd image contains AUM and HUM as well as PADME, is there also a MANI button, visible in another frame?

The button below AGARIC FLY looks like a pleasing piece of iconography for the switch for emergency pathway lights to the campsite toilet facility. Which is of course entirely appropriate for wild mushroom munching expeditions. In space.

But overall … am I right to be concerned that the emergency self destruct control panel on this ship looks so … used?

We made it to the moon and back using feet and inches! FEET AND INCHES! It was trying to adopt the metric system that lost that Mars craft, damn it. We had it right until someone tried to muck it up with their damned SI units.

Tremendous work! I am especially delighted by the extended analysis of the self-destruct sequence, which was always a favourite of mine (especially for the intentional humour of its ridiculous complexity). And I had no idea of the incredibly incongruous connection between this film and Blavatsky — it makes me wonder if the self-destruct is really nuclear, or instead is powered by Lemurian crystals from the Hidden Masters.

Also, not enough can be said in praise of Cobb’s Semiotic Standard — it really gives the interiors of the ship such a coherent look, and is a bit of design that is both utilitarian and aesthetically pleasing.

One bit of typography you mention but don’t actually identify is in the ENVIRON CTR PURGE display. Those numerals are especially notable (and wacky) — is than an existing typeface, or do you think it was custom for this display?

Best thing I’ve read all week. The detail that has to go into making all of the set dressing in movies is amazing, better still when there’s actually some thought in it. Thanks for breaking it down and teasing it apart.

That’s a very wrong conclusion. T is a time when something is going to happen happen (in this case “A big boom”). T-X designates remaining time until T. Fixed “T-10” on the panel means that there will be 10 minutes until action from the moment of activation. If you listen you will notice that voice counts from 10 minutes down to 0 (you could hear that before transmitted shuttle launches for example).

In the same manner, T-5 means that in the last 5 minutes until T (form the 10 minutes in former sentence) ability to stop self destruction will not be available. In other words, you can do that in first five minutes out of ten.

Actually, T minus 10 minutes means that the detonation will occur in ten minutes’ time. This is the time that remains before detonation. T minus 5 minutes would be the time 5 minutes before detonation.

After reading that link, I (non-english speaker so I could be perfectly wrong), would say “we are at T minus X” because something is going to happen X minutes from now. So, logically, self-destruct will happen at “after X” from activation. Yes, the countdown timer shows the minus part until we reach T, but I’m not sure that saying that “destruction will happen in T minus X” is correct at all?

This is awesome! I wonder if the ENVIRON CTR PURGE screen is an easter egg that has showed up in other Ridley movies? Sort of like THX1138 in the Star Wars movies. Or, I guess it could have just been recycled for simplicity sake.

The Alien title treatment is “Futura-ish”? I don’t think so. Futura is a geometric sans, meaning that its shapes are based on shapes like squares or circles. The A and N of the “ALIEN” type treatment are clearly not squares like a Futura A and N would be. These are closer to Helvetica or its neo-grotesk cousins than they are to Futura and its ilk, so it’s not so surprising that the movie continues on with Helvetica.

Amazing and well worth the wait! Thank you. I have indeed been waiting with baited breath, and I was not disappointed. I will echo the chorus of requests for Aliens. Also, that self-destruct keypad is a thing of beauty. Were I in possession of more money without a useful purpose, I would strive to get it in addition to Mike Okuda’s Star Trek displays, or “Okudagrams”. Perhaps a bit of Star Trek TNG fontnerdery is in order next? 😉

This is awesome.
I would love to see what you could pull from
the movie “Idiocracy”.
Specifically the scene at the hospital.
There is a panel/keyboard with a selection of symbols to help the admin diagnose the patient’s ailment…
i have had a hard time getting a good shot of it.

Great article…one minor point, you missed the registration number just under the Nostromo’s cockpit window and the lettering on the side of the Narcissus ‘garage’ that slides back to release the shuttle….

Hi George! As far as I could find when researching this post, Myanmar still “officially” uses the imperial system. As you say, people use the Burmese units for everyday purposes, and the metric system is going to become the preferred official system soon. But I couldn’t find any evidence that metrification is officially complete.

Great article. Love typography. Cheers from the publisher of Ron Cobb’s book Colorvision. And aside, he and I could have titled it Colourvision (Australian spelling) since Wild and Woolley is based in Sydney. But we didn’t.

Thanks, Pat! I managed to track down a second-hand copy of the book, and absolutely loved reading the detail therein. It’s a great read, and provided so much detail on the Semiotic Standard. Much appreciated!

At the movies’ opening shots, we see the N towing its cargo – a huge barge stacked with the kind of refineries that (with known tech) require gravity to operate correctly.

Accidentally listing a numeral 2 both the the tow-truck’s capacity and the barge’s current mass is within the realm of cinematic technical error.

The Nostromo detaches from this innominate barge and leaves it parked in space (presumably nudged into an extremely long but necessary elliptical orbit), then returns to it and bonds, unwittingly giving the Alien access to it.

When the Alien attacked, it used the barge for a redoubt. That was the big open factory-floor space Brett wandered into; it presumably went on for miles.

BTW, to clear up the terminology with the mission time (T minus 10, etc.): Your commenters are correct is saying that the “T” refers to an event time – in this case, *the time when the ship will explode*.

T *minus* 10 minutes is ten minutes prior to the explosion.

T *minus* 5 minutes is five minutes prior to the explosion.

So the instructions actually make sense.

This usage is lift straight from the space program: times prior to launch are referred to T minus; times after launch as referred to as T plus.

For example:

Prior to launch, you can hear the announcers talk about T minus 10 seconds prior to launch.

But I’m so confused about the whole T minus thing. If we’re arguing that T is activation time because of the way it is phrased, wouldn’t that mean that the cut off would stop functioning 5 minutes before activation?

It actually seems correct to me the way it is written. Detonate in T Minus 10 minutes. Detonation is T, so T minus 10 minutes is correct? Someone help me understand this please.

The problem is with usages like detonation in T minus 10 minutes. In plain English this means that detonation will be 10 minutes before some other time T. Someone, somewhere, has garbled together “detonation in 10 minutes” and “the time now is T minus 10 minutes”, because the “T minus” bit comes automatically or merely sounds apposite. I have no idea whether this illogical idiom is NASA jargon or cinematic techiness, but it makes me cringe.

I never noticed the reference to “Light Time” (5 NOV) and “Actual Time” (3 JUN) on one of the first ship screens before. Nice that they tried to acknowledge relativity, although I guess this would mean the Ripley would have REALLY missed Amanda’a 11th birthday, alien or not…

Well spotted! I think that’d be FLIGHT TIME and ACTUAL TIME, given that they’re clearly monospaced character sets. If we read “flight time” as being “ship-board time”, then it fully makes sense relativistically.

best blog post about anything, ever. A great read to accompany my re-immersion into the world while playing Alien:Isolation and having just finished an Alien series marathon! Much geek (brotherly) love.

The computer clearly lists its first priority as “INSURE RETURN OF ORGANISM FOR ANALYSIS”… which ought to come as something of a relief. This means that the ship’s only interest in getting the xenomorph to its destination was financial! The ship would pay out to a policy-holder if the alien never arrived.

Of course, if the mission was to ENsure the return… then we’d get the movie we have now.

As for the comments re imperial lbs and metric: you’re right, it would be MUCH more convenient for the US to dispense with the archaic and clumsy Imperial system and just join in using metric with the bulk of everyone else. Would save a lot of confusion.
By that same token, I’m sure then that you’ll agree that it would be MUCH more convenient for the rest of the world to dispense with the archaic and clumsy languages and just join in using English with the bulk of everyone else. Would save a lot of confusion.

Bonus points: Whilst UK uses kg, it is still legal to sell produce in pounds and ounces. Also, no one really uses kg when referring to their weight: we use stones and pounds, whereas US uses just pounds, necessitating a mental integer division by 14 to understand what they mean.

I loved loved loved this. Please do one on Aliens when you get the time. Make note of navigation the screen on the lander when it is flying down to the planet which has boxes similar to the navigation screen on the Nostromo.

I’m a big fan of cinematic sci-fi and type. Put them together and you blow my mind. Thank you for your obsessive analysis.

One quibble – I think it’s a mistake to assume that the green screen font is any version of the typeface City. Keep in mind that when ALIEN was created in the late 1970s the ability to display type on screen was extremely limited. This is most likely some off-the-shelf early computer terminal created for some rote task —perhaps even typesetting.

Alien and 2001 both have great stories. But they also share a brilliance of making use of practical effects — that is using contemporary techniques to relate a vision of the future.

Thank you! I actually did a close-up analysis of the effects during the 16:9 MU/TH/UR scenes, and I’m pretty certain it’s City Light, just stretched horizontally. Watched in slow motion, those scenes use a neat typing effect whereby they display another character in orange before the final green character is displayed. It looks far more like an animated effect than an actual computer terminal, especially given the resolution.

But we have been told that detonation is in T minus 10 minutes. For some reason, all the times are relative to 10 minutes after everything has been blown up. And the detonation can be cancelled up to 5 minutes after it has already happened, impressively.

Quick note on the funny looking keyboard: the “Padme” key you correctly identified as a derivative of “padma” is most likely taken from the six-syllable Sanskrit mantra “Om mani padme hum,” which is associated with the four-armed Shadakshari form of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. I believe this to be true because the key is situated next to two others with the words “Hum” and “Aum” (Om) printed on them.

Excellent article. You might like to know that the computer graphics showing the 3D terrain on the CRT screens during the descent of the Nostromo were designed by British graphics company System Simulation, founded by architect John Lansdown. They used the Atlas computer at the Rutherford laboratory near Didcot, because it had an advanced graphics package called ANTICS and a high resolution film plotter that printed direct to 35mm film. There’s an article about this here by one of the team, Brian Wyvill:http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/applications/animation/p014.htm

Also, the font in the landing animation was mentioned in Byte magazine. It was intended to be entirely representable by the common 7-segment character displays, but the creator noted that they did cheat, as the lower case m has an extra vertical bar in the middle.

You can only comment on the quality of type reproduction in terms of late 60’s technology. Rostrum cameras using bromide film were commonplace to create backlit signage and the ‘animated’ computer text display in Alien. There were no typesetting computers then, or colour printers for that matter. Hand colouring the clear background of bromide film was a common trick I used in design school. The fuzzy helvetica of the opening sequence is an unfortunate factor of enlargement from a projection system phototypesetter, (perhaps) these were notorious for having rounded ‘sharp’ corners because of light spread through a bromide film original.
David

Great read! love all the work you put into this… and I can appreciate the detail the creators put into every aspect of
the ship. I would imagine it would have to be that detailed given the ship and crew is the only representation we have of the world of Alien.

Got another request for you: Caprica
It was a Battlestar Galactica prequel spinoff that was unfortunately cancelled, but I really loved the technology and graphics used in the show. I was really enamored with the large touch workstation computers and the graphics of the OS, but I could never find any background production information of who art directed all of that.

It wasn’t just 2001 that used faked computer displays, the Apollo mission control displays were all tv feeds from large screens that had information projected onto them. It made it look super high tech 🙂

That city lights green console type is only in the new special edition or whatever version that they released more recently. It’s obviously newer because it’s so clean and, as you put it, “matrix”-y. The original print used a different face, but I guess Ridley wanted to make the latest edition look less dated. I think the fx house they hired made some unfortunate decisions.

It is not true that Burma uses pounds: while it does not use the metric system, it has its own traditional system of weights and measures. Both imperial and metric measures are, reportedly, used on government web pages, but that’s a question of accommodation to the outside world, including the US. (Imperial measures are often used alongside metric in the UK, too, because a large proportion of the population grew up with them and still haven’t got used to the new stuff.)

It is not true that Burma/Myanmar uses pounds: while it does not use the metric system, it has its own traditional system of weights and measures. Both imperial and metric measures are, Wikipedia says, used on government web pages, but I assume that’s a question of accommodating the outside world, including the US. (Imperial measures are often used alongside metric in the UK, too, because a large proportion of the population grew up with them and still haven’t got used to the new stuff.)

Bravo! I enjoyed this post immensely!
Re: The ‘Balaji Imperial’ cigarette pack, ‘Balaji’ is another name for the Indian deity ‘Venkateshwara’.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balaji
The turbaned figure with vaguely oriental pantaloons along with the word ‘Imperial’ also suggests colonial India. Why I wonder!

Actually Balaji, is probably a reference to the Peshwa rulers who controlled the Maratha empire before or in the beginning of the time of British colonial rule in India. These were Balaji Vishvanath or Balaji Bajirao. It would more likely be Balaji Bajirao.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balaji_Baji_Rao

In answer to your comment about not knowing what will be considered futuristic in the future… I call as witness Ivan Chermayeff, whose design philosophy, I believe, has the answer. I think you can see it in play in the film examples given. The rule is simple, if design solutions come out of a correct understanding of the problem, rather than leaning on fad or fashion, then they will endure. The aspects of the Alien typography, and other examples, that follow this rule, remain ‘un-dated’ even now. The aspects that relied on the fashion of the 1970s, now look dated.

Truly a pleasure reading all of your posts so far. I had literally just finished watching Alien about five minutes before I stumbled across your blog! It’s wonderful looking at these movies from a point of view that I rarely consider! Here’s to hoping there will be plenty more of these! Maybe Bladerunner? Mad Max?

A possible idea for another article is the Back to the Future series. If you cover that, please make some note about the way the Blu-ray of the first movie messes up the entire credits crawl and the beautiful Avant Garde lettering (or maybe do a small post just on that; it needs to be known)!

Also, in a similar vein, have you see the O’Reilly Media book “Make It So” on interface design? They use examples from science fiction as examples of both good and bad design and design elements and trends. I haven’t read the book yet, but I do have it on my eReader. It looks great!http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781933820989.do

It seems to me that their hold being only approximately 1/10 full might have caused corporate execs back home to search for ways to increase the profit margins for that trip. Leading to the landing on LV-426.

Another possibility being that picking up 1/10 of a hold of ore was just an excuse to make a trip out there and get that planet checked out.

I think I might have actually found a site geeky enough for my most unusual tastes! Love the focus on the pictograms, just wish I could find a copy of Cobb’s COLORVISION that I could afford!

Also I’m with the other Richard (not me I assure you), a “Fifth Element” article would be most welcome, I’ve been looking for inspired typefaces for about the last 14 years and found zip. Maybe if you write about it, someone will be inspired?

And great to see someone else taking issue with the French text on the self-destruct system. I recently finished making a cross stitch version of it (I know, it’s strange – http://instagram.com/p/wDCKXsQo_f/) and the repetition of “vérifier sécurité du sommet nuclear” really irritated me!

I don’t remember whether it was Alien or Aliens (the last time I saw them, and the time I noticed this, it was in a double feature), but I noticed that the regular computer keyboards did not use a standard English alphabet…. Wish I could find a screenshot or two to confirm it….

I almost never write comments on a site but I have to make an exception now. This stuff is just too excellent. This must have cost you a lot of work, and I really enjoyed reading all of it. Keep it up!

Noted to the left of the “Padme” button rests the “Hum” button. These two transliterated words form part of the Buddhist mantra “Om mane padme hum” (or “Om mane pedme hung). This phrase is sometimes translated as “Amen, the thunderbolt in the void.”

Sorry for being such a latecomer… did anyone notice what an oddball thing it was to even have the scuttling procedure printing in English and (attempted) French? After all Weyland/Yutani is a British+Japanese combine… so, why on earth FRENCH?

It’s extremely gratifying to realize that others have noticed the depth and beauty of ‘Alien’. It is one of the few films that I can watch over and over again, just to enjoy the incredible detail and quality of the design. Of course we all knew that Moebius and Chris Foss and Geiger and Ron Cobb poured their genius into it. But you have taken the appreciation to a new level. What a masterpiece it is. Thanks 😉

So cool! I a designer and sci fi nerd so this is right up my alley. Loved that Ridley re-purposed several things from Alien and dumped them into Blade Runner. I would never have noticed that! Funny because as a kid I always looked for the little background things myself. I used to pause the VHS as study bits of footage. Hahah! lad to know I’m not the only one 😛

Amazing- amazing blog. I’ve read through each entry and they are all astounding. Not prolific in terms of numbers, but the attention to detail – nay minutiae – in each posting is outstanding. Please- keep up the great work.

As a sidenote – Apple has been into that rounded rectangle thing for a loooooong time.

I don’t know what is the font of the “EMERGENCY HELMET” but I am not sure it is Helvetica. The “cuts” of helvetica letters are all horizontal or vertical. Take the letter “C” for example and compare helvetica with other fonts family. The two edges of the lines are horizontal, in Arial (and others) for example they are oblique. In Futura they are vertical.

It’s interesting that despite Art of the Title’s interview with creator Richard Greenberg, and the further analysis here, that one key feature of the title sequence is not mentioned. It’s this: the letters appear one “stroke” or segment at a time, except (spoiler) the last two, which appear simultaneously and at opposing sides of the screen (A and E).

The viewer is at first mystified by the appearing “bars” (segments) but long before the title sequence is complete, virtually everyone figures out that another segment is going to appear, and then another, until the whatever the title is going to be is spelled out. But on the next to last segment, the viewer thinks, “Ok I know what this spells” and his or her eyes cannot help but look for that last segment to appear next — but it’s already there. It’s a “gotcha”.

Someone, Ridley Scott or Richard Greenberg perhaps, are saying to the viewer: You think you’ve figured out what’s going on [in this movie], but you haven’t. There’s one more trick up our sleeves, and either you missed it, or you found it too late. The movie plays with this theme throughout and especially at the end.

Quick question… does anybody know what font is used on the self destruct keypad buttons such as “PRANIC LIFT 777”, etc?

My old keyboard broke, and I’m thinking about having somebody make me some custom keycaps for a new one, and would like to style the larger keys like some of the self destruct buttons but not sure what font they’re in.

Right down to the assumptious “appears to be an optically stretched version of City Light”

I have been looking all over for that font since I’m trying to recreate a message in a Mother C screen manner (it’s hard and time consuming work browsing through all the fonts from Aardwark to ZZ-Top trying to find a match).